Cotoneaster

Pretty much the only thing I’m happy with in my yard is the hedge along the street. It’s a plant called Cotoneaster (Blankmispel in Norwegian), or more specifically Cotoneaster lucidus.

You can just see the tiny pink flowerlets that are blooming right now. In the fall it turns spectacular colors, and it has a funky, spikey shape that I enjoy. It’s definitely staying.

There are one or two cotoneaster plants in the existing hedge that aren’t doing so well, so I’d like to replace them. I’d also like to wrap the hedge continuously around the corner so that it shields my yard more from the path up to the front door. You can see what that corner looks like currently in this photo, taken from my kitchen window on the second floor:

The plant currently in the corner is some kind of very strange rose variety that has almost no blooms, blocks my neighbor’s view from her kitchen window, is extremely difficult to trim, and is basically invasive (it’s starting to expand into the cotoneaster hedge, and seems to be killing it off). It’s actually much larger than it looks in this picture — well over 2 meters tall. The idea would be to take out the rose and replant the corner with more cotoneaster plants all the way to the gravel walkway and then along the walk for a few meters, maybe up to where the small shrub is in the picture.

That small shrub is a jasmine, which I like, except that it’s awkwardly placed and basically in the way. I was thinking that if the cotoneaster hedge were to end there, then the jasmine could just stay where it is, kind of marking the “entrance” to my yard. Perhaps a small, low storage unit could be tucked into that corner? Something like this (from the Bike Shed Company):

You can also just glimpse a stump (which would probably have to be removed) between the rose and the jasmine, as well as a round manhole cover. There have been major problems with the water line that runs parallel with the hedge through my entire yard. This actually poses a really big challenge for gardening, since I probably should keep that corridor of the yard totally free from plants and structures.

About this blog

This is a project-specific blog set to run over the 8 weeks12 weeks16 weeks 20 weeks of my apartment renovation. The apartment is located in a suburb of Oslo, Norway in a building built in 1957. For the duration I'll be living in the "MIL," the mother-in-law apartment in my ex-husband's house.